Quotes of the day

Because our intellectual knowledge of God is so small and obscure, we can sometimes gain considerable advantage in our struggle to understand what God is like by the simple expedient of thinking what He is not like.--A.W. Tozer

... most economists opining on policy just figure, 'I can make it better, ergo, the government should be given power to make it better'. Useful idiot-savants are they.--Eric Falkenstein

... you imply that if your favored [political] party wins the election, the world would be entirely to your liking. I can assure you that this possibility is remote.--Tim Harford

The introduction of the income tax made Prohibition fiscally feasible. Women's suffrage made it politically feasible. World War I created a surfeit of patriotism, a willingness to sacrifice, and an embrace of the expansion of federal power. By 1920 everything was in place for a bold new government intrusion into everyday life. ... The lesson to be found amid the scofflaws and scoundrels and anecdotes is that, even if they were ultimately on the wrong side of history, temperance forces were far more sensible than we have come to believe.--Tyler Cowen

... there is both the expected value of one’s income (measured by what it does for you in practical terms) and the uncertainty surrounding it. As the means from one person to the next converge, the uncertainty takes on increasing significance. As the “how you spend your time” differential shrinks, a reduction in uncertainty through an improvement in the safety net becomes of increasing importance. Indeed, in the limit, if everyone is typically spending their time doing the same things, reducing this uncertainty is all that matters.--Rick Brookstaber

... one catches a glimpse of the enigma of the Christian event, which Nietzsche understood and [A.C.] Grayling does not: the lightning bolt that broke from the cloudless sky of pagan antiquity, the long revolution that overturned the hierarchies of heaven and earth alike. One does not have to believe any of it, of course—the Christian story, its moral claims, its metaphysical systems, and so forth. But anyone who chooses to lament that event should also be willing, first, to see this image of the God-man, broken at the foot of the cross, for what it is, in the full mystery of its historical contingency, spiritual pathos, and moral novelty: that tender agony of the soul that finds the glory of God in the most abject and defeated of human forms. Only if one has succeeded in doing this can it be of any significance if one still, then, elects to turn away.--David Bentley Hart